The Half-Hearted eBook

“I want to thank you with all my heart,”
she stammered. And then by an awkward intuition
she looked in his face and saw written there all the
hopelessness and longing which he was striving to conceal.
For one moment she saw clearly, and then the crooked
perplexities of the world seemed to stare cruelly
in her eyes. A sob caught her voice, and before
she was conscious of her action she laid a hand on
Lewis’s arm and burst into tears.

The sight was so unexpected that it deprived him of
all power of action. Then came the fatally easy
solution that it was but reaction of over-strained
nerves. Always ill at ease in a woman’s
presence, a woman’s tears reduced him to despair.
He stroked her hair gently as he would have quieted
a favourite horse.

“I am so sorry that these brutes have frightened
you. But here we are at Glenavelin gates.”

And all the while his heart was crying out to him
to clasp her in his arms, and the words which trembled
on his tongue were the passionate consolations of
a lover.

CHAPTER XVI

A MOVEMENT OP THE POWERS

At Mrs. Montrayner’s dinner parties a world
of silent men is sandwiched between a monde
of chattering women. The hostess has a taste for
busy celebrities who eat their dinner without thought
of the cookery, and regard their fair neighbours much
as the diners think of the band in a restaurant.
She chose her company with care, and if at her table
there was not the busy clack of a fluent conversation,
there was always the possibility of bons mots
and the off-chance of a State secret. So to have
dined with the Montrayners became a boast in a small
social set, and to the unilluminate the Montrayner
banquets seemed scarce less momentous than Cabinet
meetings.

Wratislaw found himself staring dully at a snowy bank
of flowers and looking listlessly at the faces beyond.
He was extremely worried, and his grey face and sunken
eyes showed the labour he had been passing through.
The country was approaching the throes of a crisis,
and as yet the future was a blind alley to him.
There was an autumn session, and he had been badgered
all the afternoon in the Commons; his even temper
had been perilously near its limits, and he had been
betrayed unconsciously into certain ineptitudes which
he knew would grin in his face on the morrow from
a dozen leading articles. The Continent seemed
on the edge of an outbreak; in the East especially,
Russia by a score of petty acts had seemed to foreshadow
an incomprehensible policy. It was a powder-barrel
waiting for the spark; and he felt dismally that the
spark might come at any moment from some unlooked-for
quarter of the globe. He ran over in his mind
the position of foreign affairs. All seemed vaguely
safe; and yet he was conscious that all was vaguely
unsettled. The world was on the eve of one of
its cyclic changes, and unrest seemed to make the
air murky.